Keyword: catastrophism
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Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 May 23 Working in Space Credit: , NASA Explanation: High above planet Earth, a human helps an ailing machine. The machine, in this potentially touching story, is the Hubble Space Telescope, which is not in the picture. The human is Astronaut Steven L. Smith, and he is retrieving a power tool from the handrail of the Remote Manipulator System before resuming in 1999 December. For most astronauts,...
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http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,651829,00.html How star blasts forged mankind Cosmic radiation two million years ago had a crucial impact on our evolution Robin McKie Sunday February 17, 2002 The Observer They are the most destructive events in the universe, vast eruptions that rip apart stars and blast radiation across space. But supernovae may also play constructive roles in the cosmos - recent scientific research has revealed that these stellar annihilations had a crucial impact on human evolution. Two million years ago, just as the Earth's primitive apemen were evolving into big-brained humans, a pair of supernovae explosions occurred near Earth. Our planet was ...
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Supernova "smoking gun" linked to mass extinctions 15:07 09 January 02 Eugenie Samuel, Washington DC Evidence of an astronomical "smoking gun" has been discovered that supports the idea that cosmic rays from a nearby supernova triggered at least one of the six mass extinctions on Earth. Luckily for us, the astronomers say, there is very little danger of it happening again anytime soon. Narcisco Benítez at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and Jesús Maíz Appellániz of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Virginia traced the motion of a cluster of young, short lived stars formed from the debris of ...
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An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms, said research leader Dr Anton Wallner from The Australian National University (ANU). "We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years," said Dr Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research...
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A remarkable 3,400-year-old necropolis has been discovered at an Egyptian quarry site, the Ministry of Antiquities announced on Wednesday. Consisting of dozens of rock-cut tombs, the New Kingdom necropolis was found at Gebel el Sisila, a site north of Aswan known for its stone quarries on both sides of the Nile. Blocks used in building almost all of ancient Egypt’s great temples were cut from there... The shrine is a small rock-cut sanctuary featuring two open chambers facing the river and an inner doorway crowned with the winged solar disc. The burials, meanwhile, consist of one to two undecorated rock-cut...
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Periodic mass extinctions on Earth, as indicated in the global fossil record, could be linked to a suspected ninth planet, according to research published by a faculty member of the University of Arkansas Department of Mathematical Sciences. Daniel Whitmire, a retired professor of astrophysics now working as a math instructor, published findings in the January issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the as yet undiscovered "Planet X" triggers comet showers linked to mass extinctions on Earth at intervals of approximately 27 million years. Though scientists have been looking for Planet X for 100 years, the possibility...
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Three coronal holes spread across the sun are pointing at Earth. As a result, the US Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado, and the Space Weather Operations Centre of the UK Met Office in Exeter have issued an alert for tomorrow of a minor geomagnetic storm. “Early on Day 3 (April 2), a high-speed stream from coronal hole 67 is expected to reach Earth,” said the Met Office. Forecasters in the US and UK predict this could confuse migrating birds and other animals, cause minor problems with satellites and make an aurora visible as far south as Maine and...
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The carcass of one of a pair of extinct big cat cubs will be scrutinised this autumn with the realistic possibility that a liquid found in the remains of the animal is milk from the mother. Separately, it was recently revealed that samples of the prehistoric infant are being examined by South Korean to clone an animal that once occupied Eurasia from modern day Great Britain to the extreme east of Russia. A source close to the case told The Siberian Times that there is 'hope' the frozen remains of a cave lion cub will show evidence of its mother's...
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The hunters searching for mammoth tusks were drawn to the steep riverbank by a deposit of ancient bones. To their astonishment, they discovered an Ice Age puppy’s snout peeking out from the permafrost. Five years later, a pair of puppies perfectly preserved in Russia’s far northeast region of Yakutia and dating back 12,460 years has mobilised scientists across the world. “To find a carnivorous mammal intact with skin, fur and internal organs - this has never happened before in history,” said Sergei Fyodorov, head of exhibitions at the Mammoth Museum of the North-Eastern Federal University in the regional capital of...
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The reign of Ramesses III, the second pharaoh in Egypt’s 20th dynasty, was not the most stable chapter in the empire's history. There were endless wars with the “Sea Peoples”... which drained the treasury, bad weather that interrupted food supplies, along with political unrest... In 2012, eminent Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and Cairo University radiologist Sahar Saleem scanned Ramesses III mummy and revealed that an assassin cut through his esophagus and trachea, killing him almost instantly. But a new book by the pair... makes the story a little more complicated, suggesting that the pharaoh was likely murdered by multiple assailants. The...
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New research suggests that some of Saturn's icy moons, as well as its famous rings, might be modern adornments. Their dramatic birth may have taken place a mere hundred million years ago, more recent than the reign of many dinosaurs... While Saturn's rings have been known since the 1600s, there's still debate about their age. The straightforward assumption is that they are primordial -- as old as the planet itself, which is more than four billion years. However, in 2012, French astronomers found that tidal effects -- the gravitational interaction of the inner moons with fluids deep in Saturn's interior...
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Up to 12 massive volcanic blasts occurred between 8 million and 12 million years ago in Idaho's Snake River Plain, leading up to today's Yellowstone supervolcano, new research reveals. A dozen of these ancient supereruptions took place along the Yellowstone hotspot track, researchers reported Feb. 10 in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin. The trail of eruptions marks where the North American tectonic plate sailed over a superhot blob of mantle rock called a hotspot. (The mantle is the rocky layer between Earth's crust and core.) Though learning of more supereruptions in the West may seem unsettling, the findings...
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For about 60 million years during the Eocene epoch, the Indian subcontinent was a huge island. Having broken off from the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, the Indian Tectonic Plate drifted toward Eurasia. During that gradual voyage, the subcontinent saw a blossoming of exceptional wildlife, and when the trove of unique biodiversity finally made contact with bigger Eurasia, the exchange of animals and plants between these areas laid the foundations for countless modern species. "Today, mainland Asia and India have all this unique biodiversity -- but did the mainland Asian biodiversity come from India, or did the Indian biodiversity come from...
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New NASA-funded research provides evidence that the spin axis of the Moon shifted by about five degrees roughly three billion years ago. The evidence of this motion is recorded in the distribution of ancient lunar ice, evidence of delivery of water to the early solar system. “The same face of the Moon has not always pointed towards Earth,” said Matthew Siegler of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, lead author of a paper in today’s journal Nature. “As the axis moved, so did the face of the “Man in the Moon.” He sort of turned his nose up at...
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On March 22, Comet P/2016 BA14 (Pan-STARRS) flew just 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers) from Earth, making it the third closest comet ever recorded. The last time a comet appeared on our doorstep was in 1770, when Lexell’s Comet breezed by at about half that distance. Through a telescope, comet BA14 looked (and still looks) like a faint star, though time exposures reveal a short, weak tail. With an excellent map and large amateur telescope you might still find it making a bead across the Big Dipper and constellation Bootes tonight through the weekend.
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Massive collapsing stars radiate most of their binding energy (about 10^53 ergs) in the form of neutrinos. The rate of such collapses in our galaxy is expected to be greater, perhaps by a large factor, than the supernova rate. John Bahcall estimates a rate of about one collapse every 11 years in our galaxy. Stellar collapses might not exhibit the conspicuous optical show of full-blown supernovas but can still be potent emitters of neutrinos. According to Juan Collar, recently of the University of South Carolina but now with the University of Paris, stellar-collapse neutrinos may have played a role in...
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Atmospheres, like love, often don't last forever. That's the lesson we astronomers are learning (well, at least, the atmosphere part), as we push outward with our telescopes into a galaxy rich with planets. It's not an insignificant point, since the fate of atmospheres holds the key to science's most enduring question: Are we alone in the universe? Last Monday, I spent the day at Penn State working with James Kasting on how planets can lose their atmospheres into space. Kasting is a great scientist who has spent much of his career exploring what allows a planet to become habitable. In...
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Stones may hold key to why we are here ISABEL COCKAYNE January 28, 2004 10:06 They may not look like the greatest talkers, but these stones have a story to tell. Hundreds of thousands of years ago they were washed down to East Anglia with a vast river that cut through the middle of England. But what the experts are puzzling over today is where this river ran its course. If they can plot its course and date it accurately, they could prove there were humans living in Britain 500,000 years ago and fill a gap in our pre-historic knowledge....
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Shaggy, heavy-shouldered bison... made a tempting target for the hunters who walked the empty landscape between 9,000 and 13,000 years ago. The bison were attracted to a lush landscape west of Socorro, New Mexico where wetlands created by mountain runoff stretched across hundreds of acres. The hunters were attracted to the bison... At Water Canyon Dello-Russo and his collaborators have found spear and/or atlatl (throwing stick) points from the Clovis people, who hunted here more than 13,000 years ago, from the Folsom people who hunted here more than 12,000 years ago, from the Cody Complex hunters who butchered bison and...
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Two comets will zoom by Earth next week within a couple million miles — a close shave, astronomically speaking — and many astronomers hope the double fly-by will tell them whether the celestial bodies were once one. At 8:14 a.m. Monday, comet 252P/LINEAR will pass within 3.3 million miles of Earth, making it the fifth-closest comet to skim by our planet. Then at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, comet P/2016 BA14 will pass within 2.1 million miles — the third-closest comet since 1770, according to NASA officials. ... “It could be by some amazing coincidence that we are wrong, but my best...
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